swiper no swiping —

Who needs thumbs? Samsung Galaxy S IV may scroll using eye-tracking

The phone could see you seeing it seeing you.

Samsung’s Galaxy S IV will feature software that uses eye tracking to scroll content on the screen, according to a report from the New York Times on Monday. When the phone senses that readers’ eyes have reached the bottom of the screen, it will page up the content on the screen so that users don’t have to swipe, the report says.

NYT points out that Samsung filed a trademark in Europe this past January for the term “Eye Scroll,” and it trademarked “Samsung Eye Scroll” in the US in February. The US application describes the service as “software having a feature of sensing eye movements and scrolling displays of mobile devices, namely, mobile phones, smart phones, and tablet computers according to eye movements.” The term “Eye Pause” was also trademarked in the US, but the application states only that the service is “software for smart phones and tablet computers.”

Samsung has kept details on the upcoming Galaxy S IV firmly under wraps, including specs and body design. We are betting on a quad-core processor, 1080p screen, and possibly a 13-megapixel camera, but we have only rumors to go on. The NYT article states that the phone will have "a strong focus on software." So we can expect that neither body design nor specs will ride shotgun in the announcement.

Eh. Face lock works fine for me, but this level of eye tracking seems to be a stretch. I'm 50/50 on whether this could be done well.

Stone wrote:

Samsung's Siri is S-voice, and it's not very good.

:eyeroll: Tell me about it. I couldn't believe how bad it was when I first got my SGS3. Google Now was a revelation in comparison. Hell, even basic voice commands on my old G2 worked better than S-Voice.

Also, rolling your eyes isn't recommended... it might cause the phone to rotate the page, at which point continued eye rolling would be necessary to bring it back to the appropriate orientation, and if you overshoot you would have to continue rolling your eyes... this might cause disorientation, and falling or dropping your phone because of disorientation would be unfortunate.

/s

240 posts | registered Apr 27, 2011

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

I have a hard time believing it could do tracking effectively in dramatically varying light conditions well enough to not be a feature quickly abandoned.

Additionally, how often do you look at the corner of a screen, yet not want it to move. Plus, the text would be jumping around not really under your control. That sounds like more trouble than its worth.

What if I wanted to press the home button at the bottom of the screen? I look at the bottom of the phone and the screen starts scrolling down without me wanting it to. I could picture this being the first thing I would turn off.

The inevitable problems simply tracking the eye and making it do anything resembling the user's intentions, combined with the inevitable battery issues when you leave the camera turned on constantly, is going to make for an interesting failure I do believe.

There's been a lot of attention paid to how Apple seems to be coasting, with iOS and iPhone largely unchanged for several years. Didn't realize how much this impacted Samsung and Android users until this story.

There's been a lot of attention paid to how Apple seems to be coasting, with iOS and iPhone largely unchanged for several years. Didn't realize how much this impacted Samsung and Android users untill thus story.

Oh come on. I love Samsung's hardware, but their software is marginal, to say the least. Kies may be the single worst piece of utility software I've seen in the last 10 years. All their TouchWiz stuff was the first thing to go on my SIII, followed by the horribly bad Samsung Voice, which is like Google voice search's hard of hearing, ESL, younger brother.

There's no way this will work properly - the 'face attention lock' on the SIII, where it doesn't turn off the screen when it detects someone's looking at it, didn't even work properly. Now they're going to do eye tracking with intentionality?

Samsung actually does have some nice usability features, I am just not sure this is one of them.

The lift to call feature on my S3, where I can be on any screen of a contact, like a text message window, and lift the phone to my ear and it just calls them. That is nice, except when I forget to turn the screen off before putting it in my pocket, and it calls someone.

The other feature I like is the one where you can tap the top of the phone twice to scroll a list back to the top. That is a nice added feature as well.

The eye tracking I can't fathom to work how we expect future sci-fi tech to work, so it will either be a limited gimmick, or an utter failure.

There's no way this will work properly - the 'face attention lock' on the SIII, where it doesn't turn off the screen when it detects someone's looking at it, didn't even work properly. Now they're going to do eye tracking with intentionality?

The face lock feature works really well for me.

Having the screen scroll around while I am trying to read it? Color me skeptical.

I would imagine that their tracking algorithm wouldn't look for a sudden shift in gaze downwards, but rather analyze a longer period of time to spot motion that appears to be reading left to right and working down slowly. With pattern recognition, you generally guard against false positives by increasing the requirements for a match. In this case, they would probably err on the side of insensitivity to prevent it jumping around. But if it tracks a reading-like motion for a long enough time, it's a pretty good bet that the user is reading. That's not exactly the type of motion we make with our eyes when just scanning a web page.

Yeah, that's probably right - it seems like it would be too easy for me to look away when I hear a noise and discover that I've scrolled away.

But if it *did* work right it could be very cool. You could "double blink" to open a link; "blink-and-hold" to drag something around the screen, etc.

blink and hold... is that kind of like reading instructions on the internet that tell you to close your eyes? Once you've closed them, it can't track your eyes!

1. Close your eyes now.2. In a few moments, imagine a warm breeze passing through the room.3. See the beach and the crashing waves.

The readers have closed their eyes and are left wondering what to do now!

More seriously though, I can't possibly imagine this feature working with the low quality front facing cams on smartphones. The whole Smart Stay feature didn't work too well from what I've heard, and that's a much more general application of this concept.

I have a hard time believing it could do tracking effectively in dramatically varying light conditions well enough to not be a feature quickly abandoned.

Additionally, how often do you look at the corner of a screen, yet not want it to move. Plus, the text would be jumping around not really under your control. That sounds like more trouble than its worth.

Eyetracking works better with IR illumination anyway. I don't think varying light conditions will be an issue. Glasses may be, though.

I think the bigger issue is to make it actually feel like it is responding to your intentions and not just doing arbitrary things. I'm sure there will be the option to turn it off.

Advertisers must be drooling at the thought, pretty common on mobile devices for ads to float at the bottom of an app screen or web page. If it ever works, you'll have to let your eyes drift to the ad for the page to scroll.

There's been a lot of attention paid to how Apple seems to be coasting, with iOS and iPhone largely unchanged for several years.

This top part of your post hits upon something I've been wondering about: what day-to-day functionality is left to be added to smartphones?

I can't think of a single new thing I want my phone to do (and almost certainly not this)...just several things that I want it to do better. Better battery life, better camera, etc.

If you could think of them, they would already be done. That's kinda the point. Very few people in 2009 thought they would end up buying a 9.7 inch piece of glass and metal from Apple that very next year, yet look what's happened.

Disclosure: While I owned two different iPad 1s, I currently prefer the Nexus 10. Apple did a great job though.

If this is really true, it's one of the worst ideas of all time. I don't WANT a screen to go moving around based on where my eye happens to flick from one moment to the next. Scrolling isn't exactly rocket science. This technology isn't likely to work especially well and even if it were to work perfectly, it's another case of a technology looking for a reason to exist. The "featuritis" of certain smartphone vendors has jumped the shark.

Advertisers must be drooling at the thought, pretty common on mobile devices for ads to float at the bottom of an app screen or web page. If it ever works, you'll have to let your eyes drift to the ad for the page to scroll.

"have to"

because they're going to disable the option of using your finger to scroll?

Eh. Face lock works fine for me, but this level of eye tracking seems to be a stretch. I'm 50/50 on whether this could be done well.

Stone wrote:

Samsung's Siri is S-voice, and it's not very good.

:eyeroll: Tell me about it. I couldn't believe how bad it was when I first got my SGS3. Google Now was a revelation in comparison. Hell, even basic voice commands on my old G2 worked better than S-Voice.

Also, rolling your eyes isn't recommended... it might cause the phone to rotate the page, at which point continued eye rolling would be necessary to bring it back to the appropriate orientation, and if you overshoot you would have to continue rolling your eyes... this might cause disorientation, and falling or dropping your phone because of disorientation would be unfortunate.

If you could think of them, they would already be done. That's kinda the point. Very few people in 2009 thought they would end up buying a 9.7 inch piece of glass and metal from Apple that very next year, yet look what's happened.

Disclosure: While I owned two different iPad 1s, I currently prefer the Nexus 10. Apple did a great job though.

No, people had been trying to get the tablet format right for a while. Lots of people saw that coming.

Why do you prefer the Nexus 10...and have you spent any significant time with a Retina iPad?

Eye Scroll? Clever workaround in print, Samsung, but Apple will not allow you to dilute its brand verbally with your knock off of their yet to be unveiled iScroll.

Now then...

This might be something I turn off immediately. As a concept it seems like a great idea, but I get the feeling that humans don't really care for things moving on them while reading that is not 100% initiated by them.

Will the software be smart enough to know that I'm at the last word of the page? Will it scroll up on me halfway through

There's been a lot of attention paid to how Apple seems to be coasting, with iOS and iPhone largely unchanged for several years.

This top part of your post hits upon something I've been wondering about: what day-to-day functionality is left to be added to smartphones?

I can't think of a single new thing I want my phone to do (and almost certainly not this)...just several things that I want it to do better. Better battery life, better camera, etc.

I'm not sure that this applies only to smartphones. My last feature phone had pretty much all of the functionality of current day smartphones, missing only wifi and a touch screen (which is just an improvement on UI).